ransack VS Searchkick

I use ransack for this and find it very powerful and flexible without the need to rely on complex JS.

First of all, you should take a look at Active Admin's documentation regarding filters. You can continue your overview with the official README and wiki, where, among other things, you can find view-helpers to create custom search forms.

For especially complicated cases, you can consider learning how to create custom predicates and Ransackers - extensions that convert parameters directly into Arel (internal library ActiveRecord, used to build SQL queries).

The postfix _cont is one of the many predicates available in Ransack. Predicates determine which SQL query is to be generated for search. You can read more about all available predicates in the official wiki.

I run a large scale production application that does something along these lines. If the data needs to be close to real-time, I'd say use `searchkick` + Elasticsearch, and use `searchkick`'s async feature to "stream" the data from your table to the ES index. Your dashboard will then just query from the ES index via searchkick.

You're right, that's actually what we implemented, application-level hooks, but they needed development and maintenance effort that come for free with the adapter we're using for OpenSearch integration, which also comes with welcome features: synonyms, partial matches, and many others.

Spoiler, the adapter is Searchkick: https://github.com/ankane/searchkick

Searchkick

Convinced? Ok read on and I’ll show you what switching from Elasticsearch to Meilisearch looked like for a real production app — ScribeHub. We also moved from Ankane’s excellent Searchkick gem to the first party meilisearch-rails gem and I’ll show you the changes there as well.

If you want to use a look-aside pattern (like you might have used with Searchkick + Elasticsearch), you should check out ActiveStash: https://github.com/cipherstash/activestash

Searchkick learns what your users are looking for. As more people search, it gets smarter and the results get better. It’s friendly for developers - and magical for your users. BONUS: it's written and supported by "ankane" who has flawless reputation amongst the Ruby community.